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The New Yorker Slyly (Aptly) Passes Dirty Beaches As “Anonymous” Patron Of Chinatown Tobacco Shop

Yep, that’s your boy topping the NewYorker.com article “The Mayor Takes On Island Smokes.”  It doesn’t help Mayor Bloomberg’s cause in suing Island Smokes—a tobacco shop that offers free use of equipment to roll the comparably super-cheap loose tobacco it sells you—for “selling cigarettes with no tax stamp,” being “in violation of the Federal Contraband Cigarette Trafficking Act and the New York State Cigarette Marketing Standards Act,” and “being a public nuisance for selling cigarettes not verified as ‘fire-safe,’” when you add an “anonymous” and incidental figure like Dirty Beaches’ Alex Zhang Hungtai to the mix.

Whether it was writer Benjamin Shapiro’s—who also authored a Talk of the Town piece on Island Smokes last month—or photographer Rebecca Smeyne’s—live music photographer—idea to feature the photograph of Hungtai, it was a good move that will not only get nods from the indie music community, but also garner some outside support for an alternative to the egregious state of cigarette taxation. 

I’ll be walking the four blocks over to Island Smokes after work in lieu of both the $12 and the cheaper but guiltier, black-market options.  

Scope Show Me Deals Show Me Deals’ interview with Hungtai and Lantern’s Zach Fairbrother Devereaux below where we discuss the obvious, cigarettes, in addition to other things that aren’t as relevant to this post.